The friendliest image hosting for small but many images?

Discussion
1

I have many small images, and I want to embed them directly to my page. I’m looking for a free image hosting service that’s perfect for this.

2

What kind of traffic volume are you expecting? You might be fine using S3 while staying within the free tier.

3

Drew said:
What kind of traffic volume are you expecting? You might be fine using S3 while staying within the free tier.

Do I need to learn AWS first? I’m looking for something like Imgur or Flickr where I can just upload images and get embed links. That’s why I’m asking for something friendly.

Also, it’ll be low traffic.

4

@Rey
Using S3 isn’t too complicated—no coding required. Just create an account, access S3 in the console, set up a bucket, and upload your images while clicking ‘grant public access’.

You’ll find a public URL for each image in the bucket when you click on it.

5

@Rey
You can use any cloud storage with sharing features. Even Google Drive works.

6

Sky said:
@Rey
You can use any cloud storage with sharing features. Even Google Drive works.

I can’t embed Google Drive files on my page. They just don’t load.

7

Rey said:

Sky said:
@Rey
You can use any cloud storage with sharing features. Even Google Drive works.

I can’t embed Google Drive files on my page. They just don’t load.

Did you set them to public? You also need to slightly alter the URL to link directly to the file.

8

I think storing images in S3 would be my choice as well. I wouldn’t trust image hosting sites like Imgur to keep your images available for this purpose.

If that seems tough to set up, then a service like Cloudinary could be a good fit for you.

I created a tool to compare prices for image transformation and hosting. You can do quite a bit with the free versions of Cloudinary or Imagekit if your images are small: https://saasprices.net/images

9

@Devan
Why can’t Imgur be trusted?

10

Rey said:
@Devan
Why can’t Imgur be trusted?

Because Imgur isn’t designed for hosting images for your website. Using it as a CDN goes against their terms of service, and you might find your images blocked or deleted.

Content delivery incurs costs, and monetizing embedded images is nearly impossible, so finding a free service without violating terms is unlikely.

11

Rey said:
@Devan
Why can’t Imgur be trusted?

Imgur is not an image CDN. It’s against their rules, and you might wake up one day to find your account gone and images missing.

12

Rey said:
@Devan
Why can’t Imgur be trusted?

It’s essentially a public image repository. Their terms of service indicate they can remove images at will and repurpose them as they wish.

So if you need images to remain available, there’s some inherent risk there.

13

You could try imgcdn.dev.

14

Why not self-host your images?